Enduring
by antepathy
Summary: At the end of Mission City's battle, what happened to Bonecrusher and Barricade? Warnings for noncon slash and language.


A/N These two do mysteriously drop out of the ending of the 07 movie... Here's my angsty depressing canontweak. Now edited to restore the hiatus breaks that FFN suddenly decided to eat. :[

"Wish I could say you've looked better, Bonecrusher," Barricade smirked, standing over the pile of wreckage that was…still…the MPV. "But you've always been ugly. Now it's just a bit more…spread out."

"Shut the fuck up." Bonecrusher gasped, the words crackling from his vocalizer—which lay several feet from his head. "Help or go away."

"You don't really look like you're in the position to be making demands like that," the interceptor said, smoothly. "And you might consider being nice to the only mech who came back."

"The others…*kzzt*?"

Barricade frowned, dropping his optics. "Can't raise them on mission commnet. Could be jammed. Could be—"

"Dead." Bonecrusher wasted vocalizer charge on a blistering oath. "And I'm …*zzt* stuck with you."

"Oh, a real treat for me, believe me."

"You know what? Do me a-*bzzzzz* favor and just offline me. Seri*kzz*sly."

"Just because you want me to? No." Barricade knelt by the larger mech's shattered torso, reaching under a bent chest plate for the systems panel. "Where do you keep your patch kit?"

"Offline me." A pause to let the vocalizer rebuild charge. "Miserable enough place to die."

"Yeah? While I'd really love your death on my conscience, we're under orders until otherwise."

"Under *zzzz* orders! Everyone's*zzzzt* dead!"

"We don't know that." Sounded logical. Right? Not desperate. Not again. Not alone again. "And someone else will come. Eventually." His talons tightened into quick fists. He reached for his own emergency patch kit, pulling out the hose clamps, energon rats, sensor block. He bent—it was horrifyingly easy to install the sensor block component around the cortical relay. Bonecrusher's frame sagged, relaxing into the blessed numbness. Barricade clamped off the worst two bleeding lines, his hands slick with leaked energon as he clamped the second hose. That…was going to be a problem.

"Fraggin' tired!" Bonecrusher snapped. "Just let it end."

"Not my call," Barricade said, half-lying. Primus how he didn't want to be alone.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Bonecrusher awoke under some structure that was not the overpass he thought he'd die under. Probably some place just as miserable. It didn't matter. One place was as bad as any to die. Die unremembered on some fucking dungball you can't even remember the name of. How many? He couldn't even remember. Planet after planet, system after system. Blue skies, green skies, skies so far away from solar radiation they were velvet black. They all ran together in a pointless string. It had to end somewhere. Why _not _here?

He was…tired. Even this pain was familiar, and the number of cycles he'd spent floating in an agonized haze, the sensor block merely creating a penetrable barrier to the pain—too many to count. He was tired, and life? What new did it offer him? More of the same. More pain. More nameless balls of mud spinning futilely on orbital tracks that went…nowhere.

He did not have the strength to live. He recognized the cowardice in that statement, but he was too tired to care. So I am a coward. Why not? Let me go.

Why had Barricade even tried to save him? He hated the puny little interceptor. Certainly hadn't done anything to deserve rescue. If that's what this was.

And how had he gotten—wherever the frag this was?

He turned his head, slowly, aware only dimly that his head actually obeyed his command; that servos were once again responding to his controls. A corrugated roof loomed over him, over a bracing of bolted metal struts. The walls were small blocks of some substance, painted a chipping, peeling grey. Light came from beneath his feet. With an effort that sent two yellow alerts to his HUD, he raised his head to see an open roll-door, and silhouetted against the rosy-orange light, Barricade.

Two actuators clicked out: Bonecrusher's head dropped heavily to the pitted concrete floor. Barricade turned, his shadow stretching long over Bonecrusher's body as he approached.

"Shouldn't move," Barricade said.

Bonecrusher grunted. He had a dull hatred of Barricade telling him what to do. Shouldn't have kept him online in the first place. Barricade held up a pouch of energon. "This'll help." He reached for the intake in Bonecrusher's chassis.

"Don't want it."

"Don't be stupid," Barricade said. "Well, stupider than usual. Your self-repair nanites need it."

"Tired," Bonecrusher said, aware that the one word had no chance of expressing his true exhaustion. It was tiredness to the point of being a sickness unto itself, a heavy crushing weight of aged, brittle apathy. "Let me die."

"No." Barricade's voice was less harsh than before. "Wanted to die in my time, too." He clicked the small thumbwheel—energon inched down the hose toward Bonecrusher's intake. Bonecrusher watched the sludgy pink stuff with horrified distaste, willing it away from him. Almost…afraid that it would reignite in him a will to live. Right now, he was not afraid to die, he did not push death away. He was aware how fragile, how rare, this was. He did not think he could endure being forced to care again, forced to feel death as a terror. Take me now, he thought, desperately, that I am ready for it. That I WANT it, as much as I am capable of wanting anything. Take it. End it. End…me.

Barricade placed a taloned hand on Bonecrusher's shoulder armor. Bonecrusher hated it—both the possible pity behind the gesture, the strange animal comfort he took from the gesture. He gurgled a dark sound. His hands responded sluggishly, most of the control relays severed or disabled. Primus, he was a mess. Pathetic. Pawed over by the disgusting former droneling.

"I'll kill you for this," he managed, as he felt the energon flood his systems, almost scorching his lines with the sudden surge. Several relays crackled, current leaping across open air. He tightened, the new rush of alarms and pain overwhelming the sensorblock's systems reroute.

"Yeah," Barricade said.

"How'd we get here?" he asked, lamely. He felt his processor's power being slowly rerouted to his self-repair systems.

"CC'd a human vehicle," Barricade said. Against the growing light—another daycycle on this planet with a forgettable name—he was a black silhouette, in which scarlet optics glowed behind their cages. "Ditched it. We're safe as we can be."

"Oh, okay," Bonecrusher's voice sounded dim to his own audio. "Tired," he repeated.

The hand on his shoulder squeezed. Offering comfort Bonecrusher didn't want. "Yeah. You rest." Not that kind of tired: not the kind that rest can help. But Bonecrusher was too drained to try to explain. It wasn't worth the effort.

Barricade pushed to his feet and only then did Bonecrusher notice the spatters of energon and coolant down the smaller mech's legs, the hitch in his step, the sunlight picking out dents and crush damage in his armor that hadn't been there before. Bonecrusher wanted to ask why Barricade didn't take some of the e-rats of energon himself, but his vocalizer had gone into standby. He could only look, helpless, up at the smaller mech's battered frame.

"You rest," Barricade repeated. It must have been Bonecrusher's fading audio that caught something like a bad echo—maybe dropping through a radio freq on his way down—"Don't leave me."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXx

Barricade tried his comm at intervals all day, and then, a little more frantically, as dusk fell. He'd monitored police channels, and the open Autobot channel he knew how to hack, and had not heard a word about pursuit, or the strange disappearance of what should have been Bonecrusher's body. He did hear the police reports of the mysteriously-stolen flatbed truck, which he'd dumped out on some county road somewhere, which had somehow been attributed to a gang of car thieves. That track? Covered. But he had to have missed some—he'd moved with haste and haste equals sloppy. Slow is fast, the saying went. Fast was sloppy. He'd gone in sloppy fast, grabbing the first truck with the computerized components to respond to him—auto start or self start or whatever it was. He had reached out. It had woken up. He had taken it.

The lack of pursuit bothered him—as if they already knew where he was and were just waiting, tormenting him. That didn't sound like the Autobot philosophy, of course. Why passively torment when you can charge in and destroy? There was no tactical advantage to waiting, unless…unless it assuaged their pseudo-ethics to have he and Bonecrusher slowly starve to death, and then come in to pick up the pieces.

Murder with clean hands. THAT sounded like the Autobots to him.

Darkness fell and the world outside lit up as cones of sickly amber from the sparse streetlights. He pushed himself up to his feet, from where he'd crouched in the shadow of the roll door, tracking the sun from east to west, watching the rays drag themselves across the floor. His mobility systems onlined slowly: he'd cut them during the day to conserve power. The e-rats he had would not last long—not with the amount that Bonecrusher had lost.

He felt despair claw for him. You will die here. And Bonecrusher too. Just a matter of time and you will be rusted and forgotten and decayed like that pile of junk in the warehouse's abandoned back lot. Life will go on—on this planet life was thick and green and juicy and noisy and short-lived. It will climb over you, climb through you, take you in, take you down, bury you with its own insistent, demanding willfulness. Not realizing, being so ephemeral, that its own death was inevitable. Not realizing, or at least accepting, better than Barricade did.

He did not want to die. Not here, not anywhere. Technically he did not have to—replacement of systems could keep his personality components intact, theoretically, forever. Death was, perhaps, more terrifying if it was optional.

He glanced over at Bonecrusher. He'd spent most of the previous night manually repairing what he could, telling himself that each repair he did was that much less work for the larger mech's self-repair nanites, that much less a drain on their energon supplies. Bonecrusher's head had been reattached, and he had done his best to solder over the worst of the damage to Bonecrusher's chassis. With enough self-repair, Bonecrusher could move. He could not, Barricade knew, transform. And stuck as a mech, he would not be able to move about with freedom, even at night. Not that his alt mode had any great subtlety about it.

Too late, and probably moot to worry about that now. They'd probably die before that became an option, the nanites succumbing to shutdown long before then. Nanite death was agonizing to suffer through. So…there was always that to look forward to.

"No one, huh?" Bonecrusher's voice reached out of the darkness.

"No. Checked commnet and personal freqs." He wasn't going to open-channels. Not with the Autobots so close so recently. Maybe, later, as a last resort, he'd risk it. When he was dying and/or insane. When slow death was less preferable to an Autobot's weaponry.

Bonecrusher pushed himself onto his long upper arms. "Move…tail?" Barricade saw how much it took out of Bonecrusher to ask for help. Well, as grudgingly as he did. He had been lying on the clearing fork, awkwardly, for a full solar. Barricade bent down, wrapping his hands around the tines of the clearing fork, letting his weight fall back to do most of the work of shifting the tail as Bonecrusher raised himself, awkwardly, on his elbows.

The larger mech collapsed back onto the floor. "Not going to get anyone," Bonecrusher said. The sensor block component was still overriding the worst of the pain, but he was under no misapprehension about his condition. Or their situation. They were alone. No one would come for them. This was how Decepticons worked: if you could not save yourself, you were not worth saving. "Just let me offline, you stupid fuck."

"Someone will come," Barricade blustered. "I'd have heard it if all of them had been killed. Sent out call from Mars for reinforcements, too. Someone knows we're here. Someone will come."

"Pitiful. Clinging onto pathetic 'someone's. We'd be vorns dead before they'd arrive." He watched as Barricade knelt by his chassis. Growled as he felt the interceptor's talons on his fuel intake. "Don't want any." He sounded petulant, whiney. He didn't care. The fucking interceptor was stealing his dignity from him—had already stolen from him a warrior's death, dragging it out to this, THIS, humiliating spectacle.

The energon trickled into his system, blazing it to life. He could feel secondary self-repair systems kick on, greedy and delighted at the source, eager to get to work. "Pointless," he snapped. To himself as much as the smaller mech.

"Whole damn war's pointless," Barricade said, refusing to meet Bonecrusher's optics. "Comes right down to it."

"Have some your-fucking-self," Bonecrusher snarled.

A sardonic smile quirked on Barricade's face. "Why, thank you very kindly, sir, but…no." He squeezed the pouch to force the last of the energon down the feeder tube. "Can't afford to waste what little we have. Sure you'd agree keeping me online is a fraggin' waste."

Bonecrusher sagged against the rush of energy in his systems. He didn't want to repair. He didn't want to go on fighting. He was sick. Tired. Useless. More than that, he didn't want to be 'rescued' by Barricade. The pathetic useless four-opticked freak. Who probably expected Bonecrusher to be grateful. Fuck.

"Useless if you offline," Bonecrusher said.

Another flash of a grin. "Thought you thought me pretty fraggin' useless online, as well."

Bonecrusher snarled. He just did not have the energy right now to devote to the verbal sparring that was the interceptor's trademark annoyance. "So what's your plan, then?"

"We wait." The smile faded. Finally, Bonecrusher thought. "We'll figure something out. Or someone will find us."

"What if it's the wrong someone?"

Bonecrusher was not as pleased as he thought he'd be at the look of worry on Barricade's face.

Solars later, Barricade was beginning to succumb to worry. They had that solar's worth of energon left. He'd finally forced himself to have half of one when he couldn't raise the charge to run his boosted comm array to hack the Autobots' channel. That was a security necessity.

The energon had hit his systems with force enough to make him almost nauseous. He shifted on the floor. Was this how it felt for Bonecrusher?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXx

He'd learned nothing. The Autobots had moved out faster than he could rationally account for. He half suspected some trick—that they were running radio silent to lull him into coming into the open, physically or across freq. But even when he'd run a deeper hack, just feeling for the faint hums of heavily encrypted channels, he'd gotten nothing. They were gone. Out of range.

And no one was answering his hails.

A chime sounded. Time to go check on Bonecrusher. That had become one of the navigating points in the last few solars, something he did solely to stave off the rising flood of despair and the blank terror it brought with it. Checking Bonecrusher was something to do. The thing that he used to push back, push down the rising tide of panic, the thoughts that threatened to overwhelm him: you are nothing, you are alone, this is what you deserve, you will die here, you will die and no one will miss you, you are forgotten, entirely, a blip an emptiness no one even bothers to notice like when an itch doesn't itch anymore. You are…useless. Always have been. Weak. Pathetic.

It helped, in a perverse way, that Bonecrusher reminded him, ceaselessly , of the last. He staggered as he walked, the fine balancing gyros underpowered. It was all right. He didn't have that far to walk. He had to concentrate on keeping his hands steady—once he got by Bonecrusher he could systems override and reroute the power to his hand actuators. Be fine, he told himself.

"Look like slag," Bonecrusher said. "I mean, even worse than usual."

"Sounds like you're feeling better," Barricade said, trying to mask how clumsily he lowered to his knees.

"I've decided to consider this a race," Bonecrusher said. "See which of us dies first."

"So…who's winning so far?"

"We both lose."

Barricade grunted, flicking open Bonecrusher's systems panel to check his status. "Sounds like fun." He bent over to read the display, overbalanced. His head swung forward, hitting Bonecrusher's heavy chassis armor hard enough to blank his optics. He hung, waiting for Bonecrusher's scathing comment.

"Barricade," Bonecrusher said, pushing up onto one arm again. "You're fucking dying."

"Be fine," he said, weakly. "Haven't recharged."

"At all? You moron."

"Keeping guard."

Bonecrusher snarled. "There are not vulgar enough words in this disgusting human language to express how fucking stupid you are." He'd at least recharged, all of his systems marginally online, save for the ones the self-repair nanites were working on. Like…connecting the power core to his useless lower body. Recharge had its own price, though, in the dreams he'd had. He'd pushed them aside, temptations he could not afford to indulge in.

He grabbed at the smaller mech, who tried to flinch away. "Pathetic," Bonecrusher spat. His long hands grabbed for Barricade's interface panel.

"Frag," the interceptor said, trying to squirm out of his grasp. His servos whined at their lack of power. "Some kind of kink for you? Borderline necrophilia?"

"You want to die, or not. That fucking simple." Bonecrusher's voice was brutal. "Energon in overload fluid. What the fuck do you think it was designed for?" He gritted his own optics closed, disgusted at this whole thing himself. But he needed the smaller mech online if he were going to be forced to live. Besides, he took a perverse pleasure in refusing to let the little bastard kill himself. Cheat HIM of his heroic sacrificial death.

And the fact that this whole thing was equally repugnant to the interceptor didn't hurt either. He snatched up the smaller mech's module, shifting his weight to one side.

"Gonna have to do this," he muttered. "Interface system's been shifted on me." He autoclicked his own hatch open.

"No," Barricade said, his optics wary on his module, in the larger mech's hands. "Not going to. Can't."

"Shut up. I outrank you, you stupid filthy fuck." He tapped with one hand along his panel. His own module released into his hand, but he couldn't…quite…plug in Barricade's module. "Help, you slagpile. Unless you want it to hurt."

"Can't." Bonecrusher saw something like fear in the smaller mech's exhausted face.

Bonecrusher examined the module. "Looks like it's working." Sure, the green lights were…way down at the base. Ha. Not like the thought of hooking in with Barricade was doing wonders for his libido, either. He prodded the node at the tip. The smaller mech gasped, and the green lights flickered a bit higher. "Get over yourself. No one's fucking here to see."

"Not that," Barricade said. He reached for his module, trying to pry it out of Bonecrusher's larger fingers. Bonecrusher smirked, extending his arms, the module pulling out of Barricade's reach, the connector cables pulled taut. Barricade stiffened. "Come on. No."

"Don't be such a fucking sparkling," Bonecrusher muttered. "I've done worse to have to survive."

"NO!" Barricade clawed at Bonecrusher's forearm. His depleted systems rendered the gesture pretty ineffectual, beyond making Bonecrusher snicker.

Bonecrusher shrugged, one shoulder scraping along the floor. "We can do this the hard way if you want. If connecting with me is SO fucking repugnant to you. Trying to give you the chance to at least enjoy yourself." Folding the mech's module under his thumb he used his hand to flatten the smaller mech across his chassis, plugging his own module firmly into Barricade's access port. The smaller mech bit down a scream, optics flicking to the open door. Huh. So he still had some notion of security; didn't want to give their position away . Maybe he wasn't a complete idiot.

Still, the writhing the interceptor did, almost spasming in time to Bonecrusher's hard, slow datastream pulses, was…unusual. His choice though. It hurt like holy blazing fire not to have one's module connected, but, well, that kind of stupidity was perfectly Barricade. Show him what his pride was worth.

Not like Bonecrusher was particularly enjoying it. His overload systems onlined slowly, the long dormant datastream grating through his system. Necessary, he told himself. Keep the little idiot alive. He squeezed the interceptor's module tightly. He hated the little droneling. Disgusted that the stupid fuck had kept him alive. Time to return the favor. In kind.

Barricade gave little mewls of pain. Bonecrusher grunted: Shouldn't hurt until overload. Loser.

The overload built inexorably across Bonecrusher's system, pulling rivulets of energy together slowly, weaving them, joining them into a larger flood. Revolting, he thought. It had been so long, and…now this was his partner? This contemptible, disgusting pansy, twitching across him helplessly? Bonecrusher was glad this didn't require any effort, because Barricade didn't deserve any.

He hissed as the overload finally skittered across his sensornet, the small hose jerking as the overload energon raced from his reprocessing tank. Barricade sank his denta into one of Bonecrusher's grilles, denting the slats as he bit down a cry of unmistakable pain.

Bonecrusher came back from his overload fadeout, Barricade immobile on top of him. Unconscious. Bonecrusher rolled his optics, disgusted. Didn't hurt that much to single connect. "Hey," he said, poking the smaller mech. The joints creaked, loose in their sockets. The optics were dimmed. Bonecrusher pushed himself up. Was the stupid fuck dead? That would be…fucking great. Also typical. He unplugged his module, Barricade's form still limp and unprotesting.

Bonecrusher hauled the flaccid body up closer, long hands flipping the body over, searching for the mech's own readout, which he finally located under a thigh panel. Huh. Little freak was off the charts. Bonecrusher manually overrode a handful of alarms. Barricade stirred, feebly.

"The FUCK is wrong with you," Bonecrusher snapped, shaking Barricade. The motion pushed sound out of Barricade's vocalizer. His optics flickered on.

"Hurts," he gasped.

"Wouldn't have hurt if you'd've let me double connect, you stupid glitch," Bonecrusher snarled.

"No," Barricade said, pushing off the larger mech, reaching feebly to yank his module roughly from where Bonecrusher still grasped it. Bonecrusher jerked it out of his reach. Just because. "Always hurts. Mechanical defect."

"Defect is right," Bonecrusher muttered. "Can't even interface right, huh?"

"Shut up," Barricade dug his talons under Bonecrusher's armor, towards the power cable running to his cortex, his face stricken and humiliated.

Bonecrusher snorted. "Gonna waste that energon I just gave you trying to kill me? Kind of pointless, don't you think? Could've just let me die to begin with." The interceptor's grip was pitifully weak anyway. Bonecrusher ran a thumb over the module, depressing the end node. A shudder wracked the smaller mech's body.

"Hate you."

Bonecrusher smirked. "Feeling's mutual. And prepare to hate me more, you stupid glitch. You need more." He reseated his module, resetting it to pulse again. "Probably will hurt less if you double connect."

"Don't pretend you care," Barricade gritted, as the datastream pulse began hammering away at his sensornet.

"Don't," Bonecrusher said. "Think of it this way: you go unconscious again, I'll fucking kill you. That motivate you?"

"What charm school did you drop out of?" Barricade snapped; wincing repeatedly as Bonecrusher stabbed, awkwardly, to seat the module in his port. "Stupid place to put your interface equipment."

"Says the mech with the systems defect?" Bonecrusher sighed in spite of himself, the interceptor's datastream pulsing at his sensornet, moving clotted energy around. He wasn't going to go as far as say it felt…good, but it was some recompense for having to stoop this low. The second overload was easier than the first for Bonecrusher, the urgency over. He could enjoy this, pushing and pulling at his datastream, speeding it up, slowing it down, just out of range of synchrony. It brought back memories. Things he hadn't thought of the whole time he'd been lying here, dully, as a floor ornament. Memories he had not wanted to have near him as he hovered close to death—lest they tempt him. Memories that could not live again, so why torment yourself with remembrance?

Still, this much. And the sweetness of the memories blurred with the burning bitterness of being here, dying by microns, on a nameless, useless, backwater system, with Barricade.

Until he noticed—Barricade couldn't control his datastream. Frag. Bonecrusher was so startled he forgot to curse in the filthy squishy language, even in his own cortex.

The smaller mech's datastream had no choice but to chase after his, and he could see the strange pain of the effort etched on Barricade's face, how all of his servos tightened. Right. Stop fucking around. Bonecrusher slowed his datastream down, pushing against its pulse to come to match Barricade's. His sensor net glittered with pleasurable signals, little tingling ripples every time his own datapulse hit against Barricade's, the reverberations echoing across his systems. Reverberations across his aeons old memory.

The smaller mech spasmed—Bonecrusher clamped a hand over his mouth, stifling a scream. Barricade shuddered against him, claws scrabbling at his arms, arm tires juddering over Bonecrusher's hard frame. Bonecrusher's body tightened into the overload fadeout. When he faded back in, he could feel short nervous pants of air down his chassis.

"Should just keep you here," Bonecrusher said, tightening his long arms around the smaller mech. "Just because you hate it so fucking much."

"Let me go," Barricade muttered, trying to mask his weakness. "Proved your point."

"Letting you go," Bonecrusher said, "so you can check comm." He released the smaller mech, smirking as he watched Barricade's hands tremble as they sorted out their respective interface equipment. Probably been as long for Barricade as it was for him. Crappy thing to have in common. "Feel better?"

"Shut up."

Bonecrusher snorted a laugh.

Barricade walked toward the open door—clearer reception to satellite relays that way—hating how he wobbled less, how the overload energon cycled through his systems with gentle, caressing tingles. The pain was fading, slowly. The humiliation would sting for far longer.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxxxx

Darkness had fallen again. He couldn't even hear a car pass by on the distant freeway. The amber street lights cut yellow cones out of the night. He tapped his comm, leaning rigidly against the steel frame. Nothing on comm. Barricade looked back at the yellow mech, despairing. To live…at this price? Suffer through that to keep going…for how long? Temporary fix at best.

They had no more energon rations left.

Bonecrusher didn't even try to repeat the fun part of the performance. Lack of energon had weakened his own systems, and certainly had dulled his sense of humor. Barricade slumped against the mech's leg, his door wings drooping, one twisted in its mount from last night's struggle. He had given the larger mech the last of the energon earlier, the second half of the energon Barricade had started the day before. It was futile and stupid, yes, but…wasting it seemed even moreso. At least this way they denied that much of it to the Autobots who would eventually find them.

Every circuit of Barricade's body was in pain, the nanites shrieking protest as they could not even perform their maintenance routines. Bonecrusher had forced another humiliating overload on him, muttering something about wishing he'd die in pain. This time, he hadn't even offered a double connect: simply jammed the module in Barricade's port. The yellow mech had gritted his optics, hissing breath through the interface, giving a strange, yearning sound, half-sigh, half-sob, as the overload struck him.

The energon hadn't done that much. He had shut down all of his secondary systems, keeping only cooling, comm, and basic awareness online. He couldn't move. Probably lacked the energy to reboot the mobility system. He'd cut his vocalizer, more afraid that he'd whine than anything else. Certainly didn't have anything worth saying.

Bonecrusher couldn't be in much better shape, but the sensor block component masked most of it. And he'd had more than the few small, unwanted, transfusions of energon Barricade had had inflicted on him. The soft hum of Bonecrusher's central core was almost comforting. Barricade felt a thin, pathetic hope that that he would die before Bonecrusher, so that the engine vibration would be the last soothing thing he felt. Though finding any comfort in Bonecrusher repulsed him, he was beyond the ability to stir up any real energy about it.

He was going to die. With Bonecrusher. It had all been for nothing. His pathetic attempt to rescue the larger mech. All of the repair work. The abstinence from the energon. The cycle after cycle squatting in the door's shadow, sending up comm pings whenever he could summon the charge. His foolish belief that someone would come, that someone would care. Bonecrusher's…violation of him. All…for nothing. Vain wasted heroics. Suffering…for no reason. They were going to die. Futility, he discovered, tasted raw and rusty and metallic.

He wished it would happen soon. Barricade would never have believed he'd ever be willing to let go of his fierce grip on life, but he felt, like a physical thing, the grip crumble, the substance slipping through his grasp as though it had turned to a fog, a vapor, separating, tauntingly, around his grasping digits. It was…a curious feeling. He wanted to die while he was still all right with it. Still numb. When all of the pain and degradation was still a muddle, silting in his conscience, suspended in the futility of it all.

"Try again," Bonecrusher said. He had cut everything but optics/audio and vocalizer, shunting most of his coolant systems to heat sinks against the concrete floor. Barricade could see his large hand, immobile, palm cupped upward as if waiting for something to be placed in it. A gift. The sky itself. Or be taken from. Barricade's own hands lay by his sides, knotted tangles of silver, useless. Bonecrusher's module was still lodged in his port—neither of them had had the strength or will to unplug it, the energon from the last overload the only thing keeping Barricade going.

A breeze gusted through the open door. The sky outside was cloudy and dark, the air restless, as if taunting them with all of its wild energy.

Pointless, Barricade wanted to say. But even speaking was pointless. Numbly, he activated comm.

/requesting coordinates any and all survivors on this channel/

It was a live transmission, not a recording. He could hear the boredom in the voice sending its message across what must have been an empty commnet. Barricade struggled to summon up something to say. So long without responses to his own tentative pings, he'd misplaced the words. The open channel beacon must have registered on the channel board.

/repeat: any and all survivors, report. Coordinates for drop and retrieval. Status?/

"Two here. Energon depletion. Coordinates…." He struggled to call them up. He felt Bonecrusher's optics on him, aware he'd gotten…something. Teetering between hope and despair. Wanting—and not wanting—rescue.

/I have your coordinates. Energon and repairbots incoming within the cycle. They'll have follow-on coordinates for rally and pickup./

"Rally?" That meant that others survived. Others. He wasn't alone. They weren't alone. And it was coming, within the cycle. Rescue. Energon. Others. Someones.

He felt himself slump back against Bonecrusher's body, his door wings scraping along the metal. "Out," he said. He onlined his vocalizer. "Rescue," he croaked. "In a cycle."

"Can you hold on that long?" Bonecrusher almost seemed…more than morbidly curious.

"Yeah. You?"

"Don't think so."

Barricade tilted his head, the servos protesting their sudden recall to action. "Don't you fucking die on me now."

"Others?"

"Some made it."

"Good." Bonecrusher let his head drop back. "You won't be alone."

"You," Barricade said, "do not die. Cut your voc, cut your fraggin' optics. Save energy." He dropped to his physical subroutines, cutting his own sensory awareness, forcing the energy instead into his limbs. To give up, to stop, when it was so near—it suddenly seemed vile. Terrifying. A few kliks ago he would have welcomed death. Now. Now it was like trying to claw one's way up a space-frozen hull, grasping desperately for traction in the icy aloneness, trying to claw his way back to life, to hope. Now he felt cold terror at the thought of dissolution, like he'd felt once before when his pro-pack had shorted and he'd been lost, alone, terrified, hanging among the stars.

He couldn't die. He had to do something. He had to keep Bonecrusher with him. It was ludicrous, if he'd had the processing channel to analyze it. But Bonecrusher was a large mass he wanted to throw between death and himself, a talisman against his own fear, his own despair. He crawled, blind, deaf, dumb, over the larger mech, following the trail of the connector cables. With the last of his fading strength he slammed his module with both hands home into Bonecrusher's port.

Epilogue:

And that's how they found them: Barricade's talons gripping his module like a dagger plunged into the MPV's port, the two of them cut back to primary systems only, limbs rigid, systems agonizingly slow to boot up under the red alarms of starved nanites.

Barricade's optics onlined to see the six bright white optics of a repair bot peering down at him, curious and anxious. He could feel others scrambling over his frame, the red-pained circuitry soothed by an influx of fresh energon rushing into his intake, nanites tingling in a dance of rejoicing, repair bots gently guiding his systems through reboots in slow stages. He lolled his head to one side. Bonecrusher's massive bulk was swarmed with repair bots. Was he gone? Had that been a waste, too?

A mech squatted between them, a sudden burst of lighting casting sharp shadows through the long sweeps of rotors hanging from his back, greenish gunk like algae clotting the edges of his armor. Blackout too must have his own story, his own confrontation with loneliness and horror. It was written on his frame, floated across the storm-charged air with the scent of rotted seaweed and old water.

"Blackout," Barricade said. Then remembered he'd cut his voc. He onlined it, wincing at the boot sequence. The crackle of the vocalizer got the copter's attention. He turned, red optics looking down with something between amusement and respect at the smaller mech—not a friend, not an enemy. Uneasy allies. He had survived. They both had. If he had, there must be others. He must know, be able to tell Barricade what happened, what was going on.

The copter grinned. "Extreme measures, huh?" The first time he'd ever seen Blackout smile, the smile tentative, reaching out to him, a strange gesture of bonding—of those returned from death. Thunder rumbled outside, and Barricade heard the hissing patter of rain. Energy turned to life.

"Yeah." Barricade felt the need to know, the urge to live, rise together in his systems—the pull of life wrapping its tendrils around him, hauling him out of the torpor, pulling him back from the brink of death, where all he had cared about, all he had clung to, was keeping Bonecrusher going. Using the larger mech as a charm to stave off his own terror at the nothingness that had seemed to gape underneath him. What are we fighting for?

Life.


End file.
